Perla (10 page)

I was eighteen years old, in my first year at the university, studying the axis of repression, the dance of consciousness, the hidden havoc of the id. I dreamed of becoming the sort of psychologist who could reach into people’s minds, touch the unspeakable, and guide them to it and beyond it, for don’t we need to pass through the unspeakable to be truly free?

Even if it meant facing, for example, what lay within my father. The ugliness there.

But not only that, my father was not only that. He was also the man who, long ago, prowled to the kitchen at 3 a.m. only to find his daughter barefoot on the tile floor, a small insomniac in a pink flowered nightgown.
You can’t sleep, can you, Perla, you are your father’s daughter
, he would say, smiling, and search the cupboards for chocolate we would break into little jagged squares, our midnight prize for being the wild ones, the two who could not wrestle themselves down to sleep, just because the lights went out, just because the clock said it was time. We were not like Mamá, the Queen of Sleep, who could lie down when the extended ritual of cotton balls and makeup removal was complete, and doze as soon as she closed her eyes, and who could not understand why her husband and daughter tossed and turned, rose and roamed the night. Only we shared this fate, Papá and Perla, and when we were together in the kitchen in the hours before dawn, what could have been a defect came to seem like a boon, a source of stolen pleasure and shared pride.

On those nights the chocolate was sultry-sweet on my tongue. My
father would look relieved and glad as if my presence had eased whatever plagued him. He would stroke my hair and look at me as though we shared a profound understanding, beyond language, beyond time, and he’d say something like
God was good to send you to me
, or just
Eat, eat
. And I felt happy, so happy with the chocolate and his touch.

But then came the revelations of his profession. So much in one man, I could not grasp it. I could not comprehend how it all resided in one skin, and yet this seemed essential to grasping who I was. I longed to understand him, not to exonerate him, but to extricate myself, and perhaps to save him, or at least to be able to see clearly and without fear. Surely somewhere in the annals of psychoanalysis lay the secret to seeing without fear. He became my phantom patient, on whose analysis I depended for survival.

And so, at the university, I dug through the theories and case studies the professors presented to us as maps to the subconscious, in search of the workings of my father’s mind. I exhausted my textbooks, and not only my textbooks but the other tomes assigned to more advanced classes that did not yet belong to me—curled up on the floor of the university bookshop for hours, or forsaking homework to linger in the library stacks—but nowhere could I find a profile that described a person like my father, a person who had done the kinds of things that he had done. Freud had never analyzed a man like him, or if he had, his pen had refused to tell of it. (What a time Freud would have had with Héctor Correa! He would either have run away or salivated at the thought of sessions.) There were references to men like him in sociological texts, but only with the word
evil
attached, a word that, for all its moral strength, flattened the picture of a man rather than plumbing the depths of his consciousness. I read and read but still could not unravel the thick dark knots that I encountered; they were too tangled, I got lost over and over in the mire of my own mind. I was searching for answers to questions I had not fully dared to form. I had never lain on an analyst’s couch—my parents would not have permitted such a thing, and I did not have money of my
own to do so without being discovered—and in any case, though our professors considered it essential to our development, I didn’t want to. The notion terrified me. When I imagined it, I saw myself talking and talking on the couch, only to meet with silence and turn to see my analyst staring at me with Romina’s face, that night in the study, the horror and urge to run. I would not take that risk. Better that I pursue the slippery things I was pursuing by myself, surreptitiously, ravenously, each theory and case study a nest of clues. Books were already a familiar refuge, after all, and they still took me in without the slightest judgment. They don’t close to you the way a person can. You might feel as though you don’t belong anywhere, least of all in your own home, you might feel bound to a person whose actions you abhor yet unable to divorce yourself, struggling to individuate in their shadow—all these feelings you wouldn’t dare articulate to another person, no matter how highly trained—but you can bring your whole untempered self to books. You can ask them anything, and though you may need to search for the resonant lines, though the answer may come at a slant, they will always speak to you, they will always let you in. And so I entered and entered. Back then, in my first year of university, I trusted books more than people. If I was lonely, if I wished for something deeper with living breathing human beings, I didn’t know it—until the night I met Gabriel.

As I got ready for his party, I thought of
Voz
and brave young journalists and frightened fathers and broken rules and printed sentences that could shake the page that held them. I applied more makeup than usual, heavier eyeliner and shadow. The skirt was short already. I didn’t know exactly what I planned to do, or, if I did, I told myself that I didn’t know it. Just preparing, I said to myself, for whatever is offered by the night. I looked at myself closely in the mirror and the reflection didn’t look like me. Another woman stared out of the mirror, with bright eyes and a generous mouth, red-lipped, round with confidence. Such a daring mouth, to whom did it belong? I wanted to let that mouth loose, an animal off its leash, to see what sounds
might tumble from it when it opened. Surprise me, I thought to the woman in the mirror, and she laughed at me with her eyes. There was the thrill of rebellion, that night (he was a fearless journalist! the very kind they’d warned about!) but also something more. What begins as rebellion can quickly become something else, something with flesh of its own.

He had no idea I was eighteen. He was not the kind of man to seek out a girl so young. And he never did seek me out in the first place: I, Perla, a goodgirl and a virgin, was the one to make the advance. I found him in the kitchen, polite, confident, and almost haughty, the sleeves of his black linen shirt rolled to the elbows. He was the kind of man made beautiful by the generous conviction of his gestures. I watched him while pretending not to. The party came to him in steady waves. Three different girls approached him at the counter, asking him questions, smoothing their hair. Finally he glanced over. All I did was look at him, across the room, biding my time, holding him in a gaze that spoke and spoke and did not flinch or cool. As if I’d done such things before, as if I knew exactly how to calibrate the temperature of lust, as if I were some kind of vixen rather than an inexperienced girl exploring her own strength. As if I held the secrets of Eros in my power, instead of Eros having its sharp hold on me. And it did have its hold, it scratched fire across my skin, the terrible sweet wound of it, what had I begun? We stared at each other until another guest approached him and broke the spell. I slunk to the living room; I was not breathing; my own boldness seemed a cause for both triumph and alarm. I found my friends and joined their conversation, steadying my breath. If I was flushed, no one seemed to notice.

Half an hour later, he approached me in the hall. The heat immediately returned.

“Are you having a good time?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think I’ve met you before.”

“Perla.”

“Gabriel.”

“I know.”

He smiled, with a coy shyness. “Can I get you another drink?”

I looked at his hands. They were slender, surprisingly long, the hands of a woman, the hands of a languorous pianist. I wanted them to bring me things—a drink, a feather, broken glass, shards of unfamiliar songs.

He brought me a beer and stayed beside me. He was easy to talk to. We didn’t talk about politics that night: we talked about his sisters, Bob Marley, Nietzsche, my dream of traveling the world.

“Where would you go?” he asked.

“Morocco. Laos. Indonesia.”

He looked surprised. “Not Europe?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too close.”

“Not r—”

“I don’t mean geographically.”

He looked intrigued. “Then what do you mean?”

“Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, and all that. I want to go to a place to which
argentinos
have never thought to compare themselves. Where no one knows a thing about Argentina.”

“People don’t know about Argentina in Laos?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“I see. And what would you do there?”

“Look. Listen. Smell.”
And lose myself
, I thought, but this part I did not say.

“You could do that in Buenos Aires.”

“I already know Buenos Aires.”

“Are you sure?”

I started to say yes, then couldn’t.

“How,” he said, waving toward the balcony door, “can you ever fully know a city like this one?”

I looked toward the balcony, where a cluster of people smoked and laughed, while, beyond them, the city’s heart beat with electric light, and the great gray wall of an apartment building rose across the street, hoarding the secrets of centuries. In that moment the night’s pulse seemed to come roaring in through the windows, the delirious blend of a million human hearts. The city, incorrigible and sprawling and awake. For all its long and freighted history, for all its cracked façades and streaks of sorrow, on this night the city seemed young, renewed by the vigor of its people. I could have leaped from the balcony to the streets and wandered them until the sun came up, only I did not want to leave the party.

“Let’s dance,” I said.

It had been a long time since I’d danced with a boy or a man. In high school I’d begun to dance alone at parties and those around me had learned to keep their distance, that’s Perla, she’s a bit strange, there she goes moving like she’s the last person left on the planet, or, from less kind sources, like the bitch thinks music plays only for her. My friends saw me dancing with Gabriel and made faces of mock alarm,
What, you?
I laughed. I moved to the rhythm of my laugh. Gabriel looked at me strangely,
Who is this girl, where is the joke
, and I came closer so his cologne could fill my nose and coat my tongue when I opened my mouth to smile and though I longed to touch him I did not, we danced with our desire, we danced desire into being, we danced to the Rolling Stones, to U2, even to a tango when someone cued up those old songs and then his hand landed on my waist with all the sureness of a bird making a nest for itself; our bodies touched, shouts and laughter filled the room as a young generation revived the old steps their grandparents had taught them. When the song ended, we lingered close for an instant, not wanting to draw apart, and I felt his body listening for what mine wanted to say. I pulled away quickly.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Let’s go outside and get some air.”

We stayed on the balcony for hours. My friends left the party,
and, eventually, so did his. At five in the morning only a small cluster remained, drinking beers in the living room, leaving us the balcony as our kingdom. And I did feel like royalty, strangely exalted, poised up on my perch over the city, watching people walk the streets of San Telmo, leaving bars or friends’ apartments with their arms around each other. Perched up there I felt for the first time that I could own the city, and it could own me back.

“I love your apartment,” I said. “It’s the best in Buenos Aires.”

He laughed. “How do you know?”

“I know things,” I said, with mock imperiousness.

“Ah! So do I.”

“Oh really? Like what?”

That’s when he kissed me. He tasted of cigarettes and eucalyptus and beer. I had only kissed high school boys before, never a grown man, and everything about his kiss took me by surprise: its skill; its supple confidence; the measured pleasure his tongue took in my mouth, the hints it gave of skills and pleasures yet to come; and my own response to the kiss, the places that opened widely to receive it, not only my lips but my thighs (and this alarmed me, I rushed to close them but his hand was there and so they stayed half-parted, listening to his light touch) and hidden places in my being where I’d long stashed parts of myself that could not be allowed into the light. I’d never guessed a kiss could do that. I should have stopped but I could not, we kissed for a long time and I could have kept on longer. I didn’t want it to end. I could have toppled over the rail and continued as we crashed together down the streets of Buenos Aires, limbs entangled, joined at the mouth, tumbling blindly through alleys and boulevards, knocking down kiosks and café tables on our way to the sea.

He took me out to dinner the following week. We sat in a warm Italian restaurant, the kind with dim lights and dark red walls and black-and-white photographs of other eras crowding every corner. I felt far from the suburbs, transported to a Buenos Aires that, though only a train ride away from where I had grown up, still felt somewhat
foreign. I had determined that I would not talk about my family yet, and had devised various strategies for avoiding the topic, but as it turned out, it was shockingly easy. Though, I thought as the meal progressed, perhaps I should not be so shocked: he was a man, after all, accustomed to filling the air with his voice and being listened to, all the way from the reading of menus to the last spoonfuls of dessert. With just a few prompting questions from me, he told me about his father, who was from Mar del Plata, and his mother, who was Uruguayan, and how they had met on vacation in Piriápolis, a little town on the Uruguayan coast. His father was in medical school at the time, though he had hidden this fact from the girl he was pursuing to make sure that, if she returned his attentions, it would be for the right reasons, as he did not want to marry a social climber who would try to keep him from his dream of ministering to the poor. When he finally told her, at the end of an idyllic seaside week, he expected her to light up with delight, All this in a man and he’ll be a doctor!, but she looked at him without expression for a long time and then said, So you’re a medical student.